Live and let live

Life is fragile: a newly-fledged great tit chick in my garden

Life is amazing, beautiful and tenacious. Buddleia sprouts from walls, foxes make dens on waste land. But life is also fragile. One estimate in January 2013 listed over 2,000 endangered species. Human life is fragile (and sometimes endangered) too.

We may be top of the food chain but violence, disease and self-centredness cause widespread physical and emotional suffering. Recently there were four highly-publicised murders of young people in the UK: April Jones (aged 5), Tia Sharp (12), Georgia Williams (17), Lee Rigby (25). Time, perhaps, to explore a Christian view of “life”.
 

Life is precious

All life owes its origin to God the creator and sustainer, whatever your view of how it’s developed over time. That’s not just claimed in Genesis 1; it’s in Psalm 104:24-30, Isaiah 42:5, Acts 17:24-28, and elsewhere, too.

They suggest that human life is unique because people “made in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26, 2:7) are able to seek and know God. Humans are also endowed with enhanced self-awareness and creative and communicative skills. We don’t just survive; we build culture. We’re so precious that God set his love on us and took human form in order to put us back on the path to fellowship with him and each other (Philippians 2:5-8).

Life is protected

Psalm 8:3-8 and 116:15 give people a higher status than animal life, but less than angelic life. Yet that doesn’t devalue animal life; common birds are still precious to God (Matthew 10:29-31). If we have anything precious, we care for it and look after it. The “creation mandate” of Genesis 1:28, 2:15 tells us to “nurture” not “exploit”; conservation and sustainability are ancient ideas recently re-discovered and not widely observed.

The unspoken answer to Cain’s rhetorical question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) is emphatically “yes”. People who care for others are commended and those who don’t are condemned (Matthew 25:31-46). We don’t have the right to rob another person of life. The imposition of the death penalty for murder in Old Testament times was a sign of the crime’s magnitude. In modern times, judicial execution has largely been abandoned (although there are still people on America’s “death row”): many people feel even that is a step too far.

Life depends on a mindset

For most people, killing someone is emotionally difficult. It’s often achieved by regarding victims as sub-human. US soldiers who went berserk in the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam “didn’t consider the Vietnamese human” ¹. Hutus who slaughtered Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 saw their victims as cockroaches to be exterminated². And abusive US guards at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said: “It was told to all of us, they’re nothing but dogs”³.

Murder begins in the mind. Jesus virtually equated hatred and anger with murder (Matthew 5:21,22). He was saying “as people think, so they are”. We may not hurt or kill a person, but our attitude further poisons that relationship, contaminates others, and is toxic to our own spirituality. Hating someone diminishes my ability to receive God’s love for myself and to reflect it in the world. It shrivels the soul.

That’s important to remember when we look down on the local gangs as “pondlife”, wish ill on a difficult neighbour or work colleague, or even feel pleased if something befalls them; “it serves them right”. But Jesus said “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you (Luke 6:27). Flowers or a card achieve more lasting good than private or public curses.

Hard as it seems to us, God loves the people we can’t stand. If I value life, I will cherish all human life, and not physically, mentally or verbally trash the people who irritate or annoy me. We’ll explore another aspect of this in my next article.

Think and talk

1.  Look up the biblical references above. List the things they suggest about the value of human life. Which of these do we most easily forget or ignore, and why?

2.  A basic biblical command is “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Yet the world is full of conflict. What little things can we do to reduce tension and promote harmony?
3.  Jesus said God cares for the sparrows, but we’re more valuable than they are (Matthew10:29-31). How might caring for non-human life help us become more sensitive to other people’s fragility?
4.  Jesus also said he came to bring fullness of life to people (John 10:10), yet “religion” is often viewed negatively. What do you think he had in mind?

References

1.  Reported by Celina Dunlop in The archive hour, BBC Radio 4, 15 March 2008
2.  Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer effect, Rider 2009, p. 14.
3.  Ibid, p. 352.

Whatever the weather

We blow hot and cold over the weather. When it’s fine we praise it; when it’s wild we curse it. When it delays our travel, disrupts our commerce and devastates our agriculture it’s “terrible”. We regard it as if it’s some toddler throwing tantrums, instead of what it is: a mysterious, powerful force before which we can only bow in submission, and adapt our personal and corporate lives to its ever-changing moods.

I try not to complain; weather happens, period. But the past few months of “unseasonal” rain and cold in the UK (and extreme weather elsewhere in the world) have tried everyone's patience. It’s made me ask what the Bible says about weather.

The answer is surprisingly little, given that the ancient world was even more dependent than we are on the regularity of the seasons for life-sustaining seedtime and harvest. What isn’t surprising is that Old Testament writers see an intimate relationship between weather and God. Job 37:1-18 is one of several poetic descriptions of the Creator’s elemental control.

It’s the exceptions rather than the rule which gust through its pages. They too point from the events to the God who engineered them. Exceptional rains precipitated the series of plagues in Egypt, one thing in the ecosystem leading to another (Exodus 4-12). Rain and wind triggered the conditions for the fleeing Israelites to cross the Red Sea and then inundate their pursuers (Exodus 13-14). Later, battles were won and lost when weather intervened (e.g. Joshua 10:11).

Frequently prophets thundered that exceptional weather was a warning or punishment from God for corporate misdemeanours (e.g. 1 Samuel 12:16-19). Elijah predicted a three-year drought as a punishment for national idolatry which was relieved after a temporary spiritual revival (1 Kings 17-18). Much later Haggai (1:10-11) saw drought as God’s punishment on self-obsessed people who had neglected to rebuild their Temple.

They couldn’t preach that in western societies today. Ancient Israel wasn’t a democracy or dictatorship; it was a theocracy. It had a unique covenantal relationship with God and everything from marriage laws to foreign affairs was determined by religion. The nearest governmental equivalent today is a Muslim state ruled entirely by Sharia law.

Jesus didn’t cloud the issue with such icy blasts. He and the apostles were hardly candidates for judgement, yet they were caught in a ferocious storm on Galilee (Mark 4:35-41). Paul was shipwrecked after a 14-day storm in the Mediterranean (Acts 27).

Instead Jesus shone a warm ray of hope on the world by declaring that God isn’t (and never was) capricious. “He sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike” (Matthew 5:45, echoed by Paul in Acts 14:17). He taught that tragedies are not “deserved” by their victims (Luke 13:4-5). And the early church responded to weather-related hardship not by deepening people’s depression but by pioneering emergency aid (Acts 11:27-30).
 
Of course, the law of cause and effect still holds true. There have always been climatic fluctuations. There was a long warmer-than-average period in the 10^th-14^th centuries and a “little ice age” in the 17^th century. But even if current climate change is partly “natural”, global warming has undoubtedly been accelerated by human mistreatment of the environment: pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere and removing nature’s cleansing agents from forests. Wild weather is tortured nature’s mouthpiece pleading for respite.

But if a butterfly in Brazil can set off air currents that trigger a hurricane in Haiti then little acts of environmental kindness and restraint in our back yards might yet reap a harvest of peace. Meanwhile we can learn to live with inclement weather when it rains on our party. It isn’t organised for our personal convenience. We can control the atom, but not the atmosphere. It’s awesome. It calls us to patience and flexibility.

Think and talk

1.  Read Job 37:1-18. List any good things you can think of about each kind of wild weather described. How might we learn to be thankful whatever the weather?

2.  Jane is praying for fine weather for her camping holiday. John is praying for sustained rain on his crops in the next field. What principles might guide our prayers about the weather?

3.  “Bad” weather plays havoc with our transport systems. How should we regard the people who struggle to maintain them?

4.  What “little acts of kindness” can you do in your “back yard” to care for the environment?

(c) Derek Williams 2013